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Viruses are important constituents of ecosystems, with the capacity to alter host phenotype and performance. However, virus discovery cued by disease symptoms overlooks latent or beneficial viruses, which are best detected using targeted virus detection or discovered by non-targeted methods, e.g., high-throughput sequencing (HTS). To date, in 64 publications, 701 viruses have been described associated with indigenous species of Aotearoa New Zealand. Viruses were identified in indigenous birds (189 viruses), bats (13 viruses), starfish (4 viruses), insects (280 viruses), and plants (126 viruses). HTS gave rise to a 21.9-fold increase in virus discovery rate over the targeted methods, and 72.7-fold over symptom-based methods. The average number of viruses reported per publication has also increased proportionally over time. The use of HTS has driven the described national virome recently by 549 new-to-science viruses; all are indigenous. This report represents the first catalogue of viruses associated with indigenous species of a country. We provide evidence that the application of HTS to samples of Aotearoa New Zealand’s unique fauna and flora has driven indigenous virus discovery, a key step in the process to understand the role of viruses in the biological diversity and ecology of the land, sea, and air environments of a country.

Accessing healthcare during a disaster matters for the well-being of people and communities. This article explores healthcare messaging about General Practitioner (GP) services for non-COVID-19 health concerns during the Level 4 lockdown in Te Papaioea (Palmerston North), Aotearoa New Zealand. Messaging from Government, media and local GP clinics were analysed to understand how people were advised to seek care for non-COVID-19 health concerns. We found inconsistencies in these communications, ranging from messages to not attend healthcare services because of possible COVID-19 surges, to messages with vague, or lack of, information. Government messages did include advice for seeking general healthcare, but this was largely rendered invisible due to the focus on ‘staying home, saving lives’. Media messaging was similarly influenced by these Government directives. Few GP clinics had websites, and few provided information about accessing general healthcare services. Clinics also lacked up-to-date telephone messages about seeking healthcare for non-COVID-19 symptoms and illnesses. All three sources neglected the cultural, social and contextual diversity of the local audience. We recommend that communication during disasters should be clear, concise and consistent. Further, GPs should be supported to have websites and telecommunication platforms. All communications should be inclusive and aim to reach diverse audiences.

In the age of misinformation, trust and trustworthiness – core values of journalism – have become more important as news companies reeling from the pandemic seek emergency funding for their operations from the public and funders look for trusted brands to support. Earlier studies indicated people are more willing to pay for trusted news brands, and recently, the public funding of news has been directed to institutions that are regarded as trustworthy news outlets, and provide information that is in the public interest. While the concept of trust is complicated and measuring it is challenging, trust has rapidly become a key inquiry in academia. However, New Zealand lacks in this research, and this study aims to start to fill that gap. The paper is based on our survey of 1204 New Zealanders, and comparable data from 38 countries surveyed in the Reuters Digital News Report 2019. The paper finds that trust in news in New Zealand is high when compared internationally, but a large proportion (47%) of citizens don’t trust the news. It also finds New Zealanders are more concerned about misinformation and disinformation than respondents in other Western societies.

Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways Green Paper seeks a major transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand’s research, science and technology (RS&T) system and places ‘prioritisation’ at the head of its consultation process. Work to date has found that prioritisation is the most challenging topic, yet one that can provide a powerful test of whether proposed changes in all other categories can transform Aotearoa New Zealand’s research system as desired. This work analyses the potential to use more effective prioritisation as a target for transformational and feasible reform by sequentially applying frameworks identified by Meadows and Ostrom, to prioritise interventions in systems and manage common pool resources, respectively. The analysis identifies how to reframe the historic paradigms driving reform to prioritise and maximise the appropriation of well-being benefits of RS&T expenditure within Aotearoa, using an ‘NZ inc’ perspective. The analysis supports reframing and managing the nation’s RS&T institutions, infrastructure and funding as a common resource pool.

Our primary aim was to gain a better understanding of current technology availability and use in the homes of primary school children. The online-accessible questionnaire was made available for families with a child enrolled at primary school, with over 300 families participating. The results suggest that it is common for children to be introduced to screen media early in life and that they watch a wide range of content. While many families have rules regarding their children’s technology use, screen media is a significant part of their lives, with many children exceeding the recommended two hours of viewing per day. Future research could investigate whether media access and use differ between ethnic and socio-demographic groups, and whether changes have occurred as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected global healthcare access and exacerbated pre-pandemic structural barriers. Literature on disabled people’s experiences accessing healthcare is limited, with even less framing healthcare access as a human rights issue. This study documents and critically analyses Deaf people’s healthcare access experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eleven self-identified Deaf individuals participated in semi-structured videoconferencing interviews. Discourse analysis was applied to participant narratives with discourses juxtaposed against a human rights analysis. Barriers influencing healthcare access included: (1) the inability of healthcare providers to communicate appropriately, including a rigid adherence to face mask use; (2) cultural insensitivity and limited awareness of Deaf people’s unique needs; and (3) the impact of ableist assumptions and healthcare delaying care. Barriers to healthcare access represent consecutive breaches of rights guaranteed under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Such breaches delay appropriate healthcare access and risk creating future compounding effects. Action is required to address identified breaches: (1) The CRPD should also underpin all health policy and practice development, inclusive of pandemic and disaster management responsiveness. (2) Health professionals and support staff should be trained, and demonstrate competency, in Deaf cultural awareness and sensitivity.

Popular songs play an important role in mobilising political campaigns by creating platforms for voices of protest and dissent in the discussion of significant issues that questions those in power. This research considers the role songs of protest and political dissent have played over the past 60 years of Aotearoa New Zealand’s postcolonial history. Political messages have been embedded in musical texts reflecting the region’s unique historical and cultural development, especially the positioning of its Pacific peoples (indigenous Māori and immigrants from other Pacific Islands) in issues and processes of political protest. In the 1960s and 1970s, when global human rights movements were gaining traction, in Aotearoa intense feelings over inequities and injustices manifested themselves in song. Māori land rights, sporting relations with the apartheid regime in South Africa and the programme of nuclear testing pursued by the French in the Pacific were all issues of major concern, provoking marches, occupations and boycotts. The social reforms and domestic processes experienced in the separation from Britain (1947) included a ‘coming out’ of difference and dissent and a ‘coming in’ of new cultural influences into the music industry by new waves of migration and the birth of the local recording industry (1960–1986). This case study features 17 representative recordings that cover a range of themes (racism, land rights, nuclear tests, climate change and political discontent) that attracted media attention and public debate. The results presented show how protest songs in Aotearoa continue to play an important role in mobilising political campaigns in the Pacific.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, agricultural land-use intensification and decline in freshwater ecosystem integrity pose complex challenges for science and society. Despite riparian management programmes across the country, there is frustration over a lack in widespread uptake, upfront financial costs, possible loss in income, obstructive legislation and delays in ecological recovery. Thus, social, economic and institutional barriers exist when implementing and assessing agricultural freshwater restoration. Partnerships are essential to overcome such barriers by identifying and promoting co-benefits that result in amplifying individual efforts among stakeholder groups into coordinated, large-scale change. Here, we describe how initial progress by a sole farming family at the Silverstream in the Canterbury region, South Island, New Zealand, was used as a catalyst for change by the Canterbury Waterway Rehabilitation Experiment, a university-led restoration research project. Partners included farmers, researchers, government, industry, treaty partners (Indigenous rights-holders) and practitioners. Local capacity and capability was strengthened with practitioner groups, schools and the wider community. With partnerships in place, co-benefits included lowered costs involved with large-scale actions (e.g., earth moving), reduced pressure on individual farmers to undertake large-scale change (e.g., increased participation and engagement), while also legitimising the social contracts for farmers, scientists, government and industry to engage in farming and freshwater management. We describe contributions and benefits generated from the project and describe iterative actions that together built trust, leveraged and aligned opportunities. These actions were scaled from a single farm to multiple catchments nationally.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, person rights for nature have been added to the suite of resolution mechanisms for Treaty of Waitangi claims. New laws for two national parks personify landscapes and Maori relations with them to encourage greater appreciation and care, and similar arrangements will follow for other parks. However, it is uncertain whether recognizing Indigenous rights by tying them to the rights of nature will be enforceable and effective. In Te Urewera, Treaty claims emerged more from land loss than disrespect for biocultural values, but the granting of person rights was intended to avoid return of ancestral land to the local tribe, Ngai Tuhoe. Personhood will realize only some of Tuhoe’s interests because retention of preservationist conservation means that few will ever live or work on their homelands. Rather than resolving the false inclusion, repressive authenticity and delimited recognition observed in overseas processes for claims settlement, granting personhood to nature for the purported benefit of Maori is an act of mis/recognition. Disingenuously, it conflates Indigenous with environmental, development with preservation and human with natural values. En Aotearoa (nom indigène de la Nouvelle-Zélande), le principe de reconnaissance de la nature en tant que sujet de droit a été incorporé aux mécanismes de résolution des revendications du Traité de Waitangi. De nouvelles lois ont ainsi attribué une personnalité juridique aux paysages de deux parcs nationaux et aux relations que les Maori entretiennent à leur égard – et des dispositions similaires vont suivre pour d’autres parcs –, dans un souci de valorisation et de ménagement accru de ces espaces. Il n’est cependant pas certain que lier la reconnaissance des droits autochtones aux droits de la nature soit applicable et efficace. À Te Urewera, alors que les revendications formelles ont davantage procédé de la perte de terres que du mépris des valeurs bioculturelles, l’attribution du statut de sujet de droit à cet espace a constitué un moyen de contourner la restitution de terres ancestrales à la tribu locale, Ngai Tuhoe. Un tel statut ne sert par ailleurs que très partiellement les intérêts des membres de la tribu qui, en raison du maintien d’une forme stricte de conservation, vont difficilement pouvoir vivre ou travailler sur leurs terres. Plutôt que de s’attaquer à l’inclusion factice, aux injonctions essentialisantes et aux formes de reconnaissance circonscrites que l’on observe dans les processus de règlement de revendications ailleurs dans le monde, l’attribution du statut de personne à la nature au soi-disant bénéfice des Maori est un acte de mal/reconnaissance qui associe maladroitement l’autochtonie à l’environnement, le développement à la préservation et l’humain aux valeurs naturelles.

In 2020, in the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Aotearoa New Zealand consistently maintained stringent public health measures including stay-at-home lockdowns and distancing responses. Considering the widespread disruption to social functioning caused by the pandemic, this paper aimed to explore environmental and social factors that influenced the wellbeing of individuals during the first lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our mixed-methods study involved a survey (n = 1010) and semi-structured interviews of a subset of surveyed individuals undertaken at the tail end of the first 2020 lockdown. Survey participants were recruited through social media-driven snowball sampling, less than 50% were aged under 45 years and 85% identified as female. Of those interviewed, 63% identified as female. Qualitative interview findings and open-ended survey results were analysed thematically. Participants described a variety of factors influencing wellbeing, largely related to the community and household; physical, behavioural, and lifestyle factors; access to health services; and social and economic foundations. While much of the focus of COVID-19 recovery was on reversing the economic and physical toll of the pandemic, our findings emphasise the need to empower individuals, families, and communities to mitigate the pandemic’s negative implications on wellbeing.

Aotearoa New Zealand's Eco-index research programme is developing a 100-year national biodiversity vision. The purpose of the vision is to establish a concrete restoration goal that land managers can pursue through relatively small year-by-year actions and investments that lead to large cumulative biodiversity impacts over generations. This paper presents findings from a content analysis method developed to identify biodiversity restoration visions of major land management stakeholders including government, industry, NGOs, and indigenous communities. The method combines these biodiversity visions to establish a meta-vision that represents the collective national position across groups. The purpose of this research is to determine the individual and collective position of stakeholders, in order to develop the 100-year National Biodiversity Vision that reflects their stance to improves uptake and action. The meta-vision emerged as ‘strategies and initiatives to protect and maintain indigenous regional and New Zealand (biodiversity) values and outcomes.’ Both the meta-vision and group stakeholder visions highlighted processes for protecting and maintaining biodiversity but were generally technocratic and vague. Perhaps most importantly, they lacked a vision for regional or national biodiversity restoration end states and targets from which indicators could be developed and land managers could orientate action around. Consequently, we present some suitable 100-year National Biodiversity Vision suggestions which incorporate clear end-states while retaining the key values identified in biodiversity visions of land management stakeholders.

The British invasion of the Māori region of the Waikato in 1863 was one of the most pivotal moments in the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has been the subject of multiple authoritative histories and sits at the centre of historical discussions of sovereignty, colonial politics and the dire consequences of colonisation. This article approaches this complex historical moment through the personal histories of a Māori/Pākehā homestead located at the political and geographic epicentre of the invasion. This mixed whanau/family provides the opportunity to explore a more kinship-based ontology of the invisible lines of influence that influenced particular actions before and during the invasion. It does so by mobilising two genealogical approaches, one by author Hugh Campbell which explores the British/Pākehā individuals involved in this family and uses formal documentation and wider historical writing to explain key dynamics—but also to expose a particular limitation of reliance on Western ontologies and formal documentation alone to explain histories of colonisation. In parallel to this approach, the other author—William Kainana Cuthers—uses both formal/Western and a Māori/Pasifika relational ontology of enquiry, and in doing so, allows both authors to open up a set of key insights into this pivotal moment in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand and into the micro-dynamics of colonisation.

Protest is a tool that social movements can use to express discontent and present claims to those in power. In New Zealand, campaigns around native forest protection, genetic engineering, mining and offshore oil exploration have mobilised numerous participants, forcing the state to acknowledge public concerns and, in some cases, effect change of course. However, impact of the ideological orientation of the governing party on environmental protest behaviour is less well understood. The aim of this paper is to identify how political opportunities and threats in the protest arena are shaped by changes in the electoral arena. The methodology of protest event analysis is used to identify environmental protest under the left-wing Labour (1999–2008) and right-wing National (2008–2017) governments. Findings suggest that the orientation of the governing party is important in shaping opportunities, illustrated by periods of dominance of the electoral arena by the National Party leading to a corresponding intensification of mobilisation in the protest arena.

Responding to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate commitments are urgent priorities facing many governments. Meeting these commitments will require new industry management architectures that align measures of progress (economic, environmental, human and social) with government structures, datasets, and reporting. Comprehensive emissions quantification and reduction targets for tourism must be a part of this new architecture. In this paper we propose a comprehensive Tourism Carbon Information System (TCIS), comprising four essential information components: national tourism carbon footprint, the carbon-economic linkage, drivers and decarbonization progress, and benchmarking. The TCIS is then tested and applied to Aotearoa New Zealand (2007–2013) to track tourism carbon performance and its decarbonization speed, compared to the national average across sectors. This critical information sheds light on future growth in tourism relative to the national greenhouse gas inventory and establishes the required mitigation trajectory for destinations to move onto a sustainable emissions pathway.

On the morning of the 5 November 1881, my great-grandfather stood alongside 1588 other military men, waiting to commence the invasion of Parihaka pā, home to the great pacifist leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi and their people. Having contributed to the military campaign against the pā, he returned some years later as part of the agricultural campaign to complete the alienation of Taranaki iwi from their land in Aotearoa New Zealand. None of this detail appears in any of the stories I was raised with. I grew up Pākehā (i.e., a descendant of people who came to Aotearoa from Europe as part of the process of colonisation) and so my stories tend to conform to orthodox settler narratives of ‘success, inevitability, and rights of belonging’. This article is an attempt to right that wrong. In it, I draw on insights from the critical family history literature to explain the nature, purposes and effects of the (non)narration of my great-grandfather’s participation in the military invasion of Parihaka in late 1881. On the basis of a more historically comprehensive and contextualised account of the acquisition of three family farms, I also explore how the control of land taken from others underpinned the creation of new settler subjectivities and created various forms of privilege that have flowed down through the generations. Family histories shape the ways in which we make sense of and locate ourselves in the places we live, and those of us whose roots reach back to the destructive practices of colonisation have a particular responsibility to ensure that such narratives do not conform to comfortable type. This article is an attempt to unsettle my settler family narrative.

This paper draws on an initiative where we experienced being new, radical, and, from some viewpoints, dangerously progressive at Unitec—a Polytechnic/Institute of Technology in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The initiative was driven by a need to improve student experiences of interdisciplinary learning and teaching, and to develop a common semester for students transitioning to a bachelor degree programme, as well as a new suite of interdisciplinary qualifications at postgraduate level. This discussion paper is situated within a self-study paradigm befitting educational contexts, by drawing on the reflective narratives of three participants who held a range of different roles—and, hence, perspectives within the change process. Interpretations and implications are discussed using the lens of the Inclusive Framework, to illustrate personal, professional, and political elements. Our overall aim is to add to current understandings of change within the higher education sector. However, this is a study of our own experiences and we are not making claims that we are in the possession of “truth”, but, rather, we seek to identify aspects that may have relevance in other contexts. We conclude that navigating the next phase of transformative change in our context will involve seeking resolutions to key emerging questions. This includes exploring notions of multiple innovators, creating agile development environments in education and exploring the concept of time as multifaceted.

Indigenous knowledge (IK) is now recognized as being critical to the development of effective, equitable and meaningful strategies to address socio-ecological crises. However efforts to integrate IK and Western science frequently encounter difficulties due to different systems of knowledge production and underlying worldviews. New approaches are needed so that sustainability can progress on the terms that matter the most for the people involved. In this paper we discuss a case study from Aotearoa New Zealand where an indigenous community is in the process of renegotiating and enacting new indigenous-led approaches to address coupled socio-ecological crises. We reflect on novel methodological approaches that highlight the ways in which projects/knowledge are co-produced by a multiplicity of human and non-human actors. To this end we draw on conceptualizations of environmental ethics offered by indigenous scholars and propose alternative bodies of thought, methods, and practices that can support the wider sustainability agenda.